Jose Tabata's story

I haven't seen much on this in Reds country, but I'm trying to keep up with my local minor league team, the Altoona Curve. A story broke this past week that is beyond bizarre involving a 20-year old Pirates propect, Jose Tabata, who will begin the season with the Curve. I think the best summary is actually from Charlie's blog post on this:

There are so many bizarre things wrapped up in this story that I'm not really sure where to start. Just off the top:

-Jose Tabata's wife is 43?

-Jose Tabata's wife has multiple aliases?

-Jose Tabata gave the Pirates wrong information about his wife's name?

-And, oh yeah, Jose Tabata's wife may have kidnapped a two-month old baby.

Thanks to Thunder for the link.

UPDATE: More details. Tabata's wife has a rap sheet that includes theft and fraud. The U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun an investigation. It sounds like she's in very serious trouble. Hopefully, Jose is as surprised by some of these details as I am, because it would be terrible if he were connected to all this--not, obviously, just for baseball reasons but because he's a young kid with a long life ahead of him.

UPDATE II: Tabata says he's "shocked" by what his wife did.

A few days later, Tabata released a statement:

The truth is that my wife told me many lies that, until this whole situation began, I did not know. One that hurt me a lot was her history as a criminal- that she had spent years in prison, that she had robbed and committed fraud. But the worst lie was that she completely falsified her pregnancy and the eventual birth of a baby girl, which would have made me a father for the first time. Imagine how that made me feel.

Hard to know exactly what's going on in this situation. But signs are that this woman has been badly manipulating the much younger Tabata for quite some time. Hopefully he'll be able to put all of this stuff behind him. I'm going to try to make it to quite a few Curve games this season, so I'll be chearing for the kid.